"Totally coup, yo."

Or Gloria Allred is a fascist moron

Just when you think the “professional left” got a hold of something they couldn’t possibly fuck up — that is, Rush Limbaugh doing, saying, imparting, intimating anything whatsoever — they do. Hard.

While this is not the case, overall, notorious “feminist” lawyer Gloria Allred has decided to do something incredibly stupid. She’s trying to get Rush Limbaugh prosecuted under an arcane Florida statute for calling Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

Apparently, Section 836.04 of the Florida Statutes reads that anyone who “speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity” is guilty of a first degree misdemeanor. This is an antiquated, and astonishingly foolish, law which flies in the face of the very notion of freedom of speech.

Florida, you’re the worst.

Now, if Fluke wants to pursue a civil case against Limbaugh for impugning her character in the public sphere then that’s fine. She may even have a decent case to make. But offensive words should not be a crime. And if Allred thought about this for even a second, she’d have realized that subjecting people to criminal prosecution for using unpopular or “vulgar” speech is not in the interests of women — or anyone.

Allred has brought the right-wing’s & Bill Maher’s straw-person (ha, look at me being needlessly sensitive) argument to life. Their pitiful defense of Limbaugh has gone something like this: he’s allowed to say what he wants because we have freedom of speech. And, yes, this is true. But until Allred stepped, rather unwisely, into the fray, this argument was completely disingenuous because no one was suggesting otherwise. What people were suggesting, and acting upon, was their similar right to freely express their discontent by means of pressuring Limbaugh’s advertisers.

Bill Maher, you’re only slightly better than Florida — although Florida is much funnier.

What Allred has done here is to validate Limbaugh et al. That’s sad. Being an asshole should never be made a crime. And if feminism is to ever attain its goals, then women can never be given special dispensation under the law. It’s pretty simple. But Gloria Allred just doesn’t get it.

Is Gloria actually on the left? Here politics seems to run from ambulance to ambulance. Now she might very well consider herself ‘feminist’ but I’m not sure that automatically makes you a liberal.

Randy

Politically, you are correct about the effects of using this law.

But being a lawyer is primarily about winning in court. This isn’t what the law should be, but about what the law is. If Limbaugh has broken the law, that’s not Gloria’s fault — it’s Florida’s, and his. Gloria’s job is to accept cases and win them. (Of course, she may be told that the law is unconstitutional, which would be a win for everyone, and can only happen if someone tries to use the law…).

Anteprepro

Gloria Allred, if she legitimately wants to use this as a method to punish Rush, is an embarrassment to the cause. This law operates under the assumption that speaking of a woman having sex and liking it is a form of libel/slander. How fucking backwards do you have to be to claim you are a feminist and yet try to pretend that a law like that is actually legitimate? The law reeks of patriarchy, reeks of sexism. It is tangled up in and reinforces a culture that worships female virginity and sexual restraint to the point of obsession; a culture where people can naturally assume that someone suggesting a woman isn’t wearing a chastity belt is a grievous insult to that woman’s character, because any deviation from “no sex before marriage, missionary only when married” is worthy of apoplexy. I’m all for opposing insulting women for having sex, but not because doing so causes harm to her reputation. I’m against it because we shouldn’t fucking care, and people disproportionately insult women for having too much sex while patting men on the back for doing the same. Because the very idea that a woman’s reputation is dependent on their sex life is just fucking wrong. Protecting women from the grievous insult of being called promiscuous does nothing to address that double standard, and reinforces the idea that being a promiscuous woman is actually a terrible, terrible thing.

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